Computer aided engineering (CAE) has been used for supporting engineers in many tasks. For example, in a structure or engineering product design procedure, CAE analysis, particularly finite element analysis, has often been employed to evaluate simulated responses (e.g., stresses, displacements, etc.) under various simulated loading conditions (e.g., static or dynamic).
FEA is a computerized method widely used in industry to simulate (i.e., model and solve) engineering problems relating to complex products or systems (e.g., cars, airplanes, consumer products, etc.) such as three-dimensional non-linear structural design and analysis. FEA derives its name from the manner in which the geometry of the object under consideration is specified. The geometry is defined by elements and nodal points. There are a number of types of finite elements: solid elements for volumes or continua, shell or plate elements for surfaces and beam or truss elements for one-dimensional structure objects. The geometry of each finite element is defined by nodal points, for example, a brick or hexahedral element comprising eight corner nodes.
Generally these finite elements are deformable under loading. However, in certain application, rigid finite elements or rigid elements are required. Rigid elements are not deformed under any loading condition. Rigid elements can be used for modeling certain rigid structural components, for example, bolts, discrete particles or rigid bodies. To represent a rigid body in a finite element analysis model, prior art approaches require each and every rigid body to be defined with a unique identifier. For example, if there are two different rigid bodies defined in a finite element analysis model, two different identifiers must be provided, so that rigid elements that belong to either of the two unique identifiers, can be grouped together properly. For each rigid body, the inertial properties are computed from the geometry of the rigid elements included within the rigid body. While the prior art approach is straightforward for a relatively small number of rigid bodies, it is not feasible when a finite element analysis model contains a large number of rigid bodies (e.g., tens of thousands to millions). It would require a tremendous amount of man hours (i.e., costs) to define the large number of RBs hence not feasible in a production environment.
Many of today's engineering simulations require such capability (i.e., having millions of RBs), for example, simulating millions of rigid granular particles filling into a container (e.g., a drug manufacturer in pharmaceutical manufacturing). It would, therefore, be desirable to have methods and systems for defining and creating a large number of rigid bodies efficiently without the complexity and tediousness of providing a unique identifier for each and every rigid body. Each rigid body can contain any number of rigid finite elements in arbitrary orientation.